Hollow Spaces
by Mrs. James Harold Potter
Summary: Jess finally speaks to Rory for the first time since leaving Star's Hollow. End of episode 4.13 through Jess's, then Rory's eyes. Literati.
1. Jess

Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters, all the credit goes to the lovely Palladinos.

**A/N: This is my first attempt starting something new in a long time. I recently updated one of my old fics, **_**Exchanges on a Rainy Afternoon **_**(from approximately 7 years ago), but this is the first time I've written something new. Let me know what you think/what you'd like to see in the future. Thank you so much. This takes place during Nag Hammadi is Where They Found the Gnostic Gospels.**

**Let me know what you all think and what you'd like to see more of in the future! Reviews are very much appreciated. Love you all. **

Hollow Spaces

I think I'm suffocating. That's the best way I can describe it, because truthfully the lack of oxygen intake is making my head foggy. An eighteen-ton tractor trailer is parked on top of my chest, and my heart is pounding so hard to get blood and oxygen to every cell in my body that I can hear its furious pumping in my ears. So loudly, that I almost didn't hear Rory Gilmore asking me what I even stopped her for, wanted to say. I want to buy myself some time to get my heart to slow down from the mere act of being in her presence. She's not having it. She wants the instant gratification of hearing my words. I can tell she doesn't want to talk. She's angry. She's listening, but I know her well enough to know that she's not. _What do you have to say to me. _

I should fucking know what I want to say. And yet, I'm standing in front of her, completely and utterly defeated. I'm the definition of scrambling right now. I have no idea what I can say, should say, would say. To say I have given this moment some thought would be a massive understatement, because it's pretty much all I've been thinking about since I've left. At Venice Beach, the fucking hot dog stand, that crammed piece of shit apartment I'm staying in right now. I sat in these places for hours and hours and I'm surrounded by all these noises and I'll hear is her voice. All I feel is her hand touching my face. All I see are her eyes telling me it's going to be okay. This is all I think about. I think about getting my shit together and coming back to Star's Hallow, and finding her, maybe in the bookstore or at Luke's. And she says hi to me and gives me that smile that's only for me, and even though she's still hurt, she tells me with her smile it's going to be okay. These scenes cloud my vision and pervade the essence of my being. I can't focus. I look like shit.

All signs seem to point to me saying something, anything, other than staring at her with my hands in my pockets like some fucking James Dean rebel without a cause. My goal is to make it seem like I've got a handle on the situation, but I know my eyes betray me. They always do. She knows I'm suffocating.

Her hair is shorter. I am initially offended, because that's just the sort of small change you would expect someone to tell you. I imagine she might have called me from Yale during a free minute between classes. She might have told me about her classes, or the coffee cart she found, or the eccentricities of the people she's met. She would have told me about her hair. She didn't. I painfully realize I lost that privilege a long time ago. I don't get to know those things.

I wonder what she's reading right now. On her birthday this year, I was in a bookstore in Greenwich Village holding a leather-bound copy of Ayn Rand's journals. I knew she had already read them hundreds of times, but I was going to write my own notes in the margins and give it to her. The guy at the register asked me who I was buying it for, and I answered him with the most unapproachable leer I could muster. Truth is, the person for whom it was intended would probably never receive it. It's collecting dust next to my bed. I want to tell her to read Al Franken's new book and that she can just borrow mine, because I just finished it. Maybe if I can say the right thing, I'll still get to tell her that. The book is sitting on the front seat of my car. It's there, waiting for her. Although, like the journals, I think it knows it will never have its rightful owner.

I keep trying to formulate something that resembles an apology, but nothing is good enough. An apology isn't good enough. I don't even know where to begin. Everything sounds like a cliché. Everything sounds like I put it together in the moment, when it should have been planned from the moment I left for California last year. I have the words, but how do I say them? The ability to speak fails me. My mental assembly line is malfunctioning; the words I string together are incoherent. Simply, I am fucked.

Rory's eyes betray her, too. She is beyond hurt; she is livid. She is humiliated. She fought for me, defended my honor, and believed in me. That's more than anyone's ever done for me. The least I could have done was to attempt to rise to the occasion. I didn't. I am weak and worthless. She is beautiful, in all her white-hot fury.

I wonder if I'm dying. Before you die, you see your life flash before your eyes. My mom kicks me out and sends me to my uncle's apartment in the middle of fucking purgatory Stars Hallow. I see myself standing in her room on a fall evening, failing, despite my best efforts to escape from a Star's Hallow dinner party because Rory urges me to stay. I'm giving her back her stolen copy of _Howl _with my tiny scrawl in the margins and she has this surprised look in her eyes that feels a little something like hope. We're sitting on the bridge and Ernest only has lovely things to say about her. I'm watching her with this look of amusement on my face as she tries to discern the lyrics to Guns of Brixton, and I'm in awe of her because I've never known people who like The Clash quite the way that I do. I crash her car while we're taking a break from pseudo-studying and I know that everyone thinks it's my fault. Her boyfriend who doesn't get her or appreciate her built that car, and everyone blames me because I'm the hoodlum and the bad influence who is only going to hurt Rory. Maybe they are right. She is okay, but for a split second I start thinking that she's better off without Jess Mariano fucking up her life.

I go back to New York without saying goodbye. She skips school and comes up to me in Washington Square Park like it's the most normal thing in the world and says "the big apple" like it's a Hail Mary. She misses her mom's graduation, because it hurt when I left without saying goodbye. I come back (for her), and we're kissing for the first time and she's wearing this blue dress that matches her eyes and I feel light inside because she chose me. We are finally together and I feel like someone really sees me.

She notices, too, when I start to lose myself. I can't hide from her. She might not know exactly what's going on, but she knows I'm not Jess anymore. She lets the weeks slip away as I sink deeper and deeper inside myself, because she doesn't know how to reach me. I can't expect her to save me, because I don't even know how to save myself. I'm not graduating high school, I missed too many days. I'm sitting in the office having this out of body experience where I'm telling the principal that I can still graduate because I'll just make up the work.

I'm smart enough to do this, I tell myself. Rory knows I'm smart enough to do this. I simultaneously am imagining the look of disappointment on Rory's face when I tell her I can't take her to her prom. Rory, the only person who has always believed in me. Rory, who always thought I was good enough; to whom I never had anything to prove. We're in Kyle's bedroom that night at this incredibly stupid party and she knows I'm broken and wants to fix me, but the assembly line is broken then too. Words escape me. All I want is to feel her close to me. She touches my face and her fingers linger in the nooks of my elbows pulling me to her and suddenly my existence is infinitely more meaningful. My pain, however, is too much for her to fix. I am breaking her down even though I promised myself I wouldn't. I don't tell her what's going on. I'm hiding from her, and we both know it.

I run away to California to follow my dad who never really learned how to deal with his problems either. I leave, again. I don't say goodbye, again. I do all these things that I know are going to hurt her, possibly kill her, because somehow the alternate is so much worse. Running away thing was a little trick the Marianos pass on from generation to generation, I think to myself. I know she's graduating. I know I should be there. I imagine myself sitting with her on the bridge, distracting her with kisses and literary musings as she attempts to write her valedictorian speech. But instead, I see myself sitting on a guardrail looking out over this skatepark next to the beach, hypothesizing which books she would have referenced in her speech. She's Rory, there had to be books. I keep calling her and hanging up. Assembly line still broken then too. I call her, with every intent of starting with the same explanation, but I hear her voice, full of anticipation and hope and my worthlessness sets in and all my defenses and explanations crumble to nothingness.

I remember the last time I called her, at this graffitied telephone booth somewhere on the boardwalk in California. It was her graduation day. Congratulations, I miss you, I'm sorry, I want to talk to you; all appropriate greetings. A basic "hi" would have sufficed. But instead, that fucking silence takes over, and instead of hanging up, I hear Rory's voice again, but it doesn't make me feel like everything is going to be okay. _I think I might have loved you, but I'm just going to have to let that go._

All of this occurs to me in a single moment, but I'm not fucking dead yet. I'm still standing here with my breath caught somewhere between my throat and my lips. Am I even breathing? I need to say something, anything. I could start from the beginning and do my best to explain myself, but I don't think she has time for that. She doesn't want to wait for me and my explanations anymore. She's waited too long. Rory Gilmore doesn't wait for anyone. She started to wait for me, and I can tell she resented herself for it. She kept telling herself that I was worth the wait, that my showing up would make the absence worth her while. Maybe this time, I would stay. I would take her anger and confusion and work it into something that made sense. Maybe then we would both be able to breathe again.

But I can't stay here. I'm going to run. Before I even speak, we both know it. Still, something needs to be said. I can barely breathe, but I can't let the silence win this time. My head is spinning, because for the first time, I'm seeing how much I hurt her and I don't know how to fix it. She's trembling and I probably am too, but all the blood is rushing to my head so I can't really tell. My voice needs to fill the empty space between us that keeps growing and growing. I want to tell her everything, but the assembly line can't put the goddamn words together into a sentence. I need to try, even if I run. I'm going to run. But even still, I need to try to tell her all that I feel and all that I continue to feel. She needs to know that I'm sorry. I didn't want to leave, but I needed to.

I never really experienced the idiomatic "exploding" of one's heart, but in this moment, my heart is full. I am staring at her, with not a clue as to how to proceed. And yet, I'm standing here, looking into her eyes as I have so many times before and my heart is bursting at the seams with all these memories, and regret, and anger, and sadness, and respect, and trust, and appreciation, and adoration, that is so fucking intense that if I stop to think about it for another second, I might actually keel over and die.

"I love you."


	2. Rory

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, or this show.

**Thank you so much for all the support! I truly love and appreciate reviews, they give me ideas and help me figure out where I want to take my writing in the future. BIG shoutout to RedHollowGirlx, who gave me some great ideas for this second part. Everyone should check out her writing, she is the best. **

Hollow Spaces – Rory

I sprinting through the town square, away from _Jess Mariano_. Of all the people, him. I am sprinting (or at least my pathetic excuse for sprinting), and echoing everything he says back at him like a ten year old. God, I am so out of shape. The thing to emphasize here is that I am sprinting. Rory Gilmore doesn't sprint. And I'm starving. I vaguely remember waiting on line for a burger just moments prior, but somehow I ended up here. Why did I get out of line? What is actually wrong with me? Where is this sudden burst of energy even coming from? I am consciously aware of these thoughts I am having, but the most important one involves Jess Mariano. It's that he's standing in front of me and I'm desperately trying to make him go away.

I stop running and I realize that he's still following me. He keeps trying to engage me in some kind of conversation and truly I could do without. My heart is pounding and I'm experiencing this broad range of emotions that I don't want him to know about and I don't really want to explore. The only thing I want him to know is that I'm angry. That's all he's allowed to know. If I focus on being angry, he'll leave. He'll get scared, and he'll say something he'll regret, and he'll leave. He'll leave this town and my mind and my heart and he'll never come back. If I am anything but angry, he'll stay. It'll give him this false sense of security. Good plan, I tell myself. I also feel like I'm watching an episode of myself in _Dawson's Creek_because this is all so dramatic.

He's talking, I think. But I'm not really listening to the words. I'm focusing on the boiling sensation in the pit of my stomach that feels a little like actual emotion and a lot like molten lava. I examine his face and I start to see something in his eyes that I'm not used to seeing. He's not asking me to listen, he's begging me. _Anger_, I keep telling myself. You're angry. You hate him. Maybe you cared about him once, but that time is over now. You hate him. You hate him. I put him on the spot and demand that he tells me what he came here to say. Make it fast and painless. Like ripping off a band-aid. God, I hate when people say that. I make a note to never say that aloud to anyone, ever again. I also make a note of the fact that I'm thinking about band-aids right now when Jess Mariano is right in front of me and his eyes look so incredibly tired.

For a moment, I see someone who is hurting. For a moment, I see this person who used to be my best friend. I see books, record stores, and leather jackets. I hear _The Clash _and _The White Stripes_. I momentarily can remember his smell and his taste and I'm transported to purgatory just by looking into those eyes.

But I hate him. I just need to focus on that. He'll leave and he'll run because that's what he does best.

Lists. I'm good at lists. If I remind myself of all the reasons I should hate him, then actually hating him should be simple.

I think about the first time I meet him, and he's standing in my room poring over my books. He doesn't ask me if he can, he just wanders over to the bookshelf and steals my copy of _Howl_. He steals it, and fills it with his pointless comments about pointless rhetoric that I could do without. He is the only person I know who instantly knows what I mean when I call him Dodger, and he gives me this idiotic signature smirk that was customized for me.

He jumps onto my carriage ride at the Bracebridge Dinner and has the audacity to question my relationship with Dean. He thinks he has a right to tell me that Dean doesn't get it. Get me. Dean doesn't know Bjork. Surprise of all surprises, Jess is completely out of line and as always doesn't seem to care. Especially when he outbid Dean on my basket, just so he could eat my abysmal chicken salad and talk to me and get pizza and go to the bookstore and convince me to buy Hemingway novels he knows I'll hate. Salt and pepper dip is awful. Bukowski and Austen would have never hit it off. He hates Indian food and after being subjected to it almost ten times in a two week span, I can say with certainty that I never want to see a movie with Kate Hudson ever again. Jess Mariano has ruined Kate Hudson for me, forever. He totals the car that Dean makes me, and then runs away to New York without even saying goodbye, just because he can. I skip school to see this person, to give him the chance to at least say goodbye, and I miss Mom's graduation. For this person who is never even there for me. He kisses me back at Sookie's wedding even though he knows I love Dean.

He turns me into this person that I wasn't supposed to be. Dean was the safe place, and Jess tore me away from it. I develop these destructive tendencies, including, but not limited to: spending time with Jess, not spending time with Dean, falling in love with Jess, falling out of love with Dean, kissing Jess, thinking about Jess, pretending to love Dean, not loving Dean, lying to Dean.

I'm angry because I think that by dating him, I can change him. He's damaged but kind and I think of his good heart and that look that is only for me, and I think that I can change the way he sees the world. I delude myself into thinking I can be the one to teach him how to love. I can make him adore me the way Dean adored me. I'm angry because I depend on him too much. I trust him too much. I let him off the hook when he disappoints me. I accept his horrible excuse for a black eye as a football injury. I'm not hurt because of the black eye, I'm hurt that he thinks he can't tell me the truth. Ignored phone calls are somehow remedied by concert tickets. He isn't able to get prom tickets or graduate or do any of the things I always said he was capable of doing. His dad shows up for the first time in years and I know that he's terrified of him and the future and himself, but somehow those things would have been okay if he hadn't tried to run to California instead of confiding in me. He becomes this angry person I always feared he would become if he stopped believing in himself. He loses the ability to tell me how he feels so he tries to show me with sex in Kyle's bedroom, which obviously can't happen. He gets frustrated and runs, and that's the last real time I feel close to Jess. He disappears off the grid, slowly at first, and then completely and entirely.

He calls me a million times the day I graduate, and I figure it's him and I almost start crying during my graduation speech because I wanted Jess to hear about all the books. I'm angry at him for that too. He calls me after and finally I answer and I tell him that I'm done and that this isn't my fault. I tell him I'm leaving for college and going to Europe and that's that. _I think I might have loved you, but I'm just going to have to let that go._

I hate him because he is this person that I miss. I go to Europe and even though I never tell mom, I'm thinking about him constantly. He follows me to Yale. I keep that annotated copy of _Howl_ in my backpack. Which is perfect, because it's tiny and no one knows or questions it if they do catch sight of it. Every time I read his indecipherable scratch I notice something new. I'm 22.8 miles away from home, and I know that because he looked it up and it makes me wonder if he knew he was always going to run.

I spend my time in this fantasy would where Jess and I are together because he apologizes. Because an apology is the only thing that would make this better. But I know Jess doesn't do apologies, so I wonder how it would even happen. I start from the ridiculous, like being woken up in the middle of the night by Jess as John Cusack in _Say Anything_ outside my building with a boombox, and end up at the realistic, like opening my student mailbox to find a copy of _Old Man and the Sea,_ with messy scrawl that offers some sort of explanation and the beginnings of forgiveness. We start over, and he drives to visit me at Yale on the weekends sometimes. We go to the coffee cart and my classes and he blends in perfectly. He sits in on a Chaucer lecture and is mumbling something to me about the Wife of Bath while contentedly flipping through _The Bell Jar_. We go back to my dorm and watch a movie and he's holding me in his arms and I realize that all the pain we've both experienced make this single moment worthwhile.

This fantasy world is really just a fantasy, though. That's where it stays. Tucked away on my bookshelf somewhere between C.S. Lewis and Hans Christian Anderson is Rory's Gilmore's _The Jess Anthologies._

In reality, I lie awake at night, resenting myself for thinking about this person who clearly wasn't thinking about me. I feel like I have been floating around through my freshman year at Yale. Floating from class to class, floating at Friday night dinners, floating through my interactions with people. Everyone wants me to try and meet someone new, but all I can think about this boy I hate who doesn't appreciate Ayn Rand (another thing I hate about him). I cut my hair short, which, in retrospect, is some stupid declaration of independence for me, and I feel guilty when I get a rush of satisfaction in knowing that if Jess saw my hair this short, he would know it was something that _I_ kept from _him_ for a change, not the other way around.

I sometimes go back to Star's Hollow on the weekends (like this one) to visit Mom. No one notices that my heart races when I ask Luke how he's doing at the diner, because I'm hoping that he'll mention anything about Jess. Everyone thinks they're protecting me by saying nothing, but I think not knowing makes it even harder to move on. I want to move on. I'm tired of seeing him everywhere I go. I'm tired of being that girl everyone roots for in the young adult fiction novel, who eventually finds true love after many trials and tribulations. Stop rooting for me. I don't want your support. I don't need it. I tell myself that I am strong, and that I don't need him, but somehow those words aren't convincing enough. I try to throw out my copy of _Howl_ a little bit after my birthday this year, end up sleeping with the book under my pillow.

When I find out the Jess is in town, I have this renewed sense of hope, that maybe he'll have something to say to me. Maybe it won't be John Cusack or _The Old Man in the Sea,_ but some compromise between the two. I would take that. This idea occurs to me where I give Jess (via Luke) this cryptic note leading him to the bridge, where he would find me, and we could finally work things through. Instead, I sat on the bridge the night I saw him sleeping in his car for an hour, throwing rocks into the water, half hoping that if I stayed long enough, Jess would show up out of the blue, like he always does. Like he is right now.

I didn't sleep that night.

Jess Mariano is silently standing in front of me, struggling with words I know he will never actually say. He unnerves me, and it is taking every bit of focus and concentration to hide my trembling hands and knees. I feel powerless in his presence, but this is nothing new. I cannot hide from Jess because he sees right through me when I look at him. No matter what I say or how I say it, he only hears what I _mean_. He understands me, sometimes in ways that I feel even Mom doesn't. I don't need to explain myself with Jess, the silence usually does the talking for me. I worry sometimes, because I don't want to lose myself. I think of that night in the car when Jess tells me he believes in me, and it was the first time I really truly felt it too.

There is a second that I start to doubt whether or not I'm really angry and more just hurt, but I don't entertain that thought for too long, because I know Jess will see it.

We're standing here and I'm waiting for him to say something and my breath is caught somewhere between my throat and my lips. There are a million and one things he could say but something tells me Jess won't say the right thing. That is his pattern. He says or does the wrong thing, and gets scared, and runs. I want him to stay, and I want him to save me from this feeling of being impaled by a thousand knives simultaneously. I want him to close this hollow space between us that used to be filled with so much. I want to fill it with something good, something that will make me feel like anything but this shell of a person who floats around, wanting her life to be something that it currently is not.

I hate him. How dare he, come back to my town and follow me wherever I go, with nothing to say. After all he's done to me, I have nothing to say. He is worthless. He has nothing to offer me. He is nobody. I am more than it ever was, and am more than it would have been.

But then he opens his mouth and tells me he loves me and everything goes out the window because they are the truest words he has ever spoken to me because his voice and his eyes tell me so. It feels like that moment in a cartoon when the wrong person walks into the party and the disc jockey scratches the record and everybody and everything stops and is just staring at that person. Jess is that person.

_I think I might have loved you, but I'm just going to have to let that go._

I'm standing here, and even though he just told me he loved me, I'm waiting for him to say something more and I don't know what it is and my breath is still caught somewhere between my throat and my lips and all I can think about are my words to him at my graduation and how I was so incredibly afraid all this time that maybe they weren't entirely accurate.

_I love you, and I don't want to let that go._

But I didn't say that, and then he was gone.


End file.
